Monday, May 21, 2012

What Is It And How Do I Cook It: Gyoza!

Last week's Cooking Class had gyoza on the menu. YUM! Gyoza (aka potstickers) are often seen floating in hot and tasty noodle bowls. Chopped ingredients are seasoned and sealed inside a dough packet, then fried and steamed. Even the pickiest eaters enjoy gyoza! The Japanese members of the group explained that, while gyoza are a traditional, Chinese food, adding many chopped items to the filling makes these gyoza more "Japanese." So grab a bunch of veggies, seafood, or meat, and start chopping!

Chop ingredients as small as possible. Everything is chopped in its raw state, except for cabbage. Steam the cabbage before chopping. After chopping, make sure to squeeze out the excess water.

Squeeze out the water several times! You may even want to
roll the cabbage inside a clean, kitchen towel to get it more dry.

Once all ingredients are chopped, and the cabbage is dry, mix ingredients thoroughly. Add a little salt, pepper, and soy sauce.

If desired (and available), add a packet of Chinese seasoning.

Grab a pre-made gyoza wrapper (the ladies showed us how to make them from scratch. I am not even going to go there. Just buy some from your local, grocery store). Dampen the edges with water, and add a small spoonful of mixture to the middle of the wrapper. Fold the wrapper in half. Pinch the edges together, fluting the wrapper as you go.

My sad ones are at the top left. The pretty ones are the ones made by our
Japanese instructors. I think I spied someone"fixing" mine, later. Haha.

Heat some vegetable oil in a frying pan. Brown the gyoza on each side. Add enough water to cover just the bottom of the gyoza. Cover the pan and steam until the water is evaporated.

Remove and serve hot, either alone or in noodle bowls!

A delicious, dipping sauce can be made with a little soy sauce, vinegar, and Chinese chili oil. So good!

Why Blog?

This blog is for us, the spouses of American military stationed in Japan (but all are welcome to stop by!). We fell in love with someone amazing, maybe had a kid or two, and then moved to this wonderful but foreign country. We were too jet-lagged to remember anything we learned in orientation classes or maybe all we could think about was that our spouse was deploying next week. Now we are here for several years and have to figure out how to live: with kids, language barrier, deployed spouse, and absent extended families. But we can do it! The outer trappings of Japan may look different, but the core is still the same. Japanese mommies still feed their kids baby food. Japanese look for good deals at the grocery store. Japanese parents want strollers that fit on the trains. Deep down, we all speak the same language.No matter where we live in the world, people are still people. Ganbatte- you can do it!